Matt Gurney: The problem for funding transit isn't raising the $50B needed. It's trusting the government to spend it right

The problem for funding transit isn't raising the $50B needed. It's trusting the government to spend it right

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It was about halfway through a meeting with John Tory and Mitzie Hunter, of advocacy group CivicAction, that I began to wonder how much it cost to invent the atomic bomb.

CivicAction has been working for years to raise public awareness about the need to properly fund Metrolinx’s “The Big Move” plan. The Big Move lists dozens of identified transit projects throughout the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) that, if completed, would not only improve local transit, but would also create an integrated regional system. Some are already underway. But dozens more remain unstarted and unfunded. It’s an issue that politicians in and around Toronto love to talk about, but none seem capable of actually addressing. And delay only makes the problem worse — hundreds of thousands of new residents move into the GTHA every year.

That’s where the atomic bomb came in. I’ve often said that the region needs a Manhattan Project-level of financial commitment in order to overcome decades of inaction on transportation.

I was wrong: It needs two Manhattan Projects. Implementing The Big Move will cost $50-billion, of which $34-billion is uncommitted. Building the bomb cost, in today’s dollars, only $26-billion.

It’s not that we can’t raise the needed money, especially since we’d spread that out over several decades. There are many suggestions on what sources of revenue — road tolls, new taxes, licensing fees — can be combined to get us there.

But there are dozens of officials, representing the province and all the GTHA’s communities, who need to agree on what that funding plan would look like. That’s where the problems start. Toronto’s city council can barely make up its mind on what to build with money it was given, and that’s just one city.

“We try to focus people on the need for a plan,” Mr. Tory, CivicAction’s chairman and current NewsTalk 1010 host, said Monday in a meeting with the Post’s editorial board. “It’s meant to create an environment in which the [region’s] political leaders will make the decision … about whether they’re going to find a way to pay for this or not.”

That’s the problem right there. According to Ms. Hunter, raising the funds necessary for The Big Move would require only 83¢ per regional resident per day. Ask anyone stuck in traffic or crammed into an overcrowded TTC subway how that sounds and no doubt they’d agree it’s a bargain. But voters throughout the GTHA, and especially in Toronto, can be forgiven for doubting whether their elected leaders are capable of taking any new revenues and actually using them to build transit instead of just flushing it down what Mr. Tory aptly referred to as “the government black hole.”

This shouldn’t be so hard. Metrolinx has the list of things that need building, already put in prioritized order, and the pricetag, while significant, is not insurmountable. The problem, of course, is that no one actually believes a politician who insists that new revenues are needed to build a subway when hundreds of millions are being spent to not build power plants.

“Our politics is so dysfunctional,” Mr. Tory rightly noted. “I think we’ve had a chronic short-sightedness when it comes to building a great city… [Politicians] look two weeks, two months, to the next election and no further.”

Indeed. But that’s the problem with developing transit in the region. It’s not that we can’t figure out a way to raise the necessary funds. It’s that we don’t trust the people who’d be the ones writing the cheques.